From 1930 until 1950, a time that spanned World War II and President Roosevelt’s "fireside chats," Philco International Corporation sold more radios than any other company. And a lot of the credit for its success goes to a businessman with ties to Cotuit.

From 1930 until 1950, a time that spanned World War II and President Roosevelt’s “fireside chats,” Philco International Corporation sold more radios than any other company. And a lot of the credit for its success goes to a businessman with ties to Cotuit.

For the opening lecture of this summer’s “Cotuit Chronicles” at the library, Albert Crocker Knight presented “From Ocean View Avenue to Embassy Row,” a biography of Dempster McIntosh, who from his Cotuit boyhood moved on to international business and three ambassadorships in Latin America.

Knight is a tenth-generation son of Cotuit himself. His mother was descended from Josiah Crocker, known as the first white settler of Cotuit.

McIntosh “is Cotuit’s own Horatio Alger,” said Knight, who met the international businessman when they both lived in Connecticut. Knight said that McIntosh, “a jovial figure,” was an elementary school classmate of Knight’s grandfather.

Knight credited the Patriot for information about McIntosh’s Cotuit boyhood. In fact he included in his lecture readings from the Patriot from 1903-1908 to show what life was like in the village during McIntosh’s boyhood, aged 7 through 12, as the son of a gardener on the Rothwell estate, where Knight himself served as a summer laborer in his youth.

Knight wrote in a letter to the Patriot that, in addition to this paper’s archives in Sturgis Library in Barnstable Village, he had found information in the National Archives, the New York City Public Library, and from descendents of McIntosh, who died in 1984 in Florida.

Tom Hadley, Marcia Dudley, and interim library director Valerie Morgan read items from the Patriot, such as the report of when Cotuit’s “base ball” team beat Falmouth’s – twice in one day.

The village, with its stream of visitors and commerce, likely got young McIntosh interested in business and in life around the world, said Knight. The family moved to Pittsburgh, where McIntosh ended his formal education and started a business career in 1911, at the age of 15.

Early in World War I, he served as a second lieutenant in the Army quartermaster corps. He then began a career in export that led to his appointment as president of Philco in 1943, a post he held for ten years, said Knight.

During the Philco years, McIntosh’s family summered at Cotuit’s “The Pines.” The party consisted of McIntosh and his wife, their three daughters, and the father who had once been a gardener in the village.

In 1953, McIntosh’s life changed once again. A mentor, U.S. Sen. James Duff, introduced the executive to U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and C. Douglas Dillon, a diplomat who became undersecretary to Dulles.

Dulles and Dillon introduced McIntosh to U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The President saw in the international businessman a potential ambassador.

In 1953, Eisenhower sent McIntosh to Uruguay, a country whose name means, in the language of its first inhabitants, “river of painted birds.”

After that first posting, McIntosh returned home to serve a year as manager of the U.S. Development Loan Fund in Washington, D,C.

The assignment led to another diplomatic posting from the President: Venezuela. “This was his biggest responsibility, the most critical, because of the oil,” said Knight, who explained that “almost 50 percent of the oil we imported was from Venezuela and [McIntosh] had to deal with dictators. It was a country that was ready to explode, literally.”

From the oil of Venezuela, McIntosh was next dispatched to Colombia, which Knight described as the “world’s largest producer of cocaine,” with all the attendant dangers of a drug-fueled economy. It is from that appointment that the ambassador who knew Cotuit so well retired in 1961.

“His Cotuit boyhood prepared him to succeed later in life,” said Knight, who told the Patriot in a later conversation that the lesson to be learned from McIntosh is a lesson about time.

“Use one’s time on earth well,” said Knight, an attorney. He acknowledged that his childhood piano teacher, Dulce Bryan, was in the audience. “Time is so fleeting.”

There are four more presentations in the 2010 Cotuit Chronicles: “Cotuit and the Gold Rush” (July 7); “History of the Mosquito Yacht Club” (Aug. 18): “The Ecology of Crocker Neck” (Sept 15). All take place at the Cotuit Library, 871 Main St., at 7 p.m. The final talk, a tour of Mosswood Cemetery, is scheduled for 10 a.m. on Oct. 30 at the old part of the cemetery.

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